Monday, September 22, 2008

banner ad blindness

Eye tracking and usability research has indicated that not only are banner ads not clicked, they're not even noticed, a term dubbed "banner ad blindness," so they apparently don't even count for much in the branding department.

Banner Ad Blindness

If a marketer determines that advertising is an integral part of their online marketing plan, and often they do, there are several formats and technologies that are capable of outperforming traditional display ads - by a lot - why aren't more people using them? Video ads for instance. Video ads are seeing anywhere from 10 - 20X CTRs over traditional display ads. They are also demonstrating recall of up to 4X over television ads. Why? Well, look at the graphic above, when a video ad plays the viewers attention is already focused on the content that was previously occupying that space. There are also rich-media banner ads that in addition to rich media content have the feature sets that make it possible for users to share and embed content directly from the ad.

Source: http://blog.heavybagmedia.com/2008/06/19/why-is-everyone-still-dumping-money-into-banner-ads/